Sen. Jim Inhofe hates planet, loves dictators

Okay, sit down for this one, because it’s just twisted. Jim Inhofe, the Oklahoma senator who called global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” and who was most recently seen trying to castrate the EPA, is practically besties with Ivory Coast despot Laurent Gbagbo, basically because they go to the same scary church.

Gbagbo lost an internationally certified election in November 2010, but he hasn’t reacted the way a normal sore loser would (recounts and Supreme Court cases). Instead, his forces have embarked on a campaign of violence that Human Rights Watch has called "crimes against humanity," including the execution of detainees and civilians. The number of Ivory Coast refugees has now topped 1 million.

But Inhofe’s not fussed. He’s met with Gbagbo a bunch of times, and on the strength of that, he says that Gbagbo won the election fair and square, and he’s refused to ask Gbagbo to stop his atrocities and leave peacefully. "I am aware that my position is different from that of the Obama administration, which has recognized Alassane Ouattara as the winner," he wrote last week to Hillary Clinton, leaving open the question of whether he’s aware that his position is also different from that of the United Nations and the African Union.

Inhofe’s dumb ideas about climate change don’t explain his support of Gbagbo — they just explain why we already didn’t like him. Instead, he backs Gbagbo because they both have ties to the Fellowship, a shadowy fundamentalist Christian political organization that is actually totally really real even though it sounds like a David Icke book.